- Over 8,000 total wildfires in California saw more than one million acres burned in total in 2024.
- The Los Angeles fires in January 2025 resulted in at least 25 fatalities, the destruction of over 12,000 structures, and an aggregate economic cost of up to $275 billion (the highest such total in U.S. history).
- Giving the growing frequency of extreme wildfires amid draught and dry conditions, global carbon dioxide emissions attributed to wildfires has increased 60% between 2001 and 2023.
- It can take up to 65 years for a full recovery to ecosystems after wildfires.
Photo by Benjamin Kerensa on Unsplash
Current Problem
Wildfires are a serious and growing problem with power utility companies. In recent years, the state of California has witnessed immense devastation from wildfires caused by malfunctioning power lines and utility equipment. Even when the fires are not specifically tied to utilities and instead to the increasingly dry and fire-prone conditions caused by climate change, power companies find themselves regularly needing to plan for and adjust operations due to ongoing wildfire risk. Wildfires caused by utility malfunctions or otherwise have led to many people losing their lives, homes, neighborhoods and entire towns while destroying countless acres of wildlands. These fires also eliminate the natural carbon sink capacity from the many trees on forested land and cost billions of dollars in economic damage.
Climate change is creating hotter and drier environments and the risk of wildfires and the many negative impacts is growing. Prevention of utility-caused wildfires is a critical issue for energy providers and the many lives, wild-lands, and ecosystems at risk near them.
The focus, pace and commitment of technological advancements has created innovative opportunities to improve grid safety and reduce these risks. But technology is not going to solve all our problems, we still need human hands on the ground to provide support and care for a healthy forest ecosystem.
Emerging Solutions
Los Angeles
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) has about 14% of its service area under High Fire Threat Area, which is small compared with the rest of the state but still requires the utility pay careful attention to preventing any faulty equipment or aging assets from sparking disaster. To stay on top of that, the utility has regularly exceeded $1 billion in annual spending towards its wildfire mitigation since 2019, specifically by installing sensors, intelligent equipment, and analyzing that resulting data to identify risk areas before anything may occur.
California
California has taken the unfortunate mantle of ground zero for utility-caused wildfires in the United States, but the power providers and associated regulators have bounced back to use that as an opportunity to become a nation-wide leader for technological solutions to prevent repeats of the horrific wildfires of the past few years.
Specifically, some of the most promising solutions implemented across the state include:
- Installation by Pacific Gas & Electric of hardware that can detect issues with circuits on the grid that would lead to the eventual malfunction
- Use of high-resolution cameras deployed via drone to detect where in California’s forests were utility assets that had seen unexpected rusting and degradation that could lead to wildfires
- Implementation of an AI-based solution to prioritize where tree-trimming is most needed across California utilities to remove potential kindling from touching grid infrastructure
National
While the wildfires of recent years have made the most headlines in California, the same issues are prevalent across the United States. In 2024 alone, wildfires burned nearly 9 million acres nationwide, prompting federal government to prioritize its efforts to prevent, mitigate, and fight wildfires associated with utility equipment in forested area. In 2024, President Biden announced a comprehensive wildfire prevention plan that called for:
- Increased pay, mental health resources, and upgraded equipment for firefighters who risk their lives to halt wildfires in their tracks
- Expanded funding for advanced satellite imagery, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics to detect and contain wildfires at their earliest stages
- Boosting investments in wildfire research to better understand ignition sources, high-risk spread zones, and the most effective suppression techniques
Global
Many nations across the world also have the dangerous mix of wooded areas and an aging utility infrastructure that will also be prone to preventable wildfires. In particular, several of California’s largest utilities have teamed up with counterparts in Australia to form the International Wildlife Risk Mitigation Consortium to share collaborative solutions that have come out of these regions having to deal with the unfortunate wildfire risks. The utility industry tends to be a collegial one, rather than cutthroat like many other industries, largely thanks to the fact that these companies tend to have regulated monopolies over their service area and aren’t competing for the same customers. As such, they can more freely work unitedly towards common solutions and shared practices. These international organizations can be so much stronger together than they would be just as the sum of their parts, so this type of nation-to-nation collaboration must continue to be a key strategy.